The Director gestured for her to sit. Closer now, she could see the toll that the war had taken on him—as it had on herself. His sleeves were rolled up, his collar unbuttoned, and the stubble on his cheeks and chin said that he’d been there since the previous day. He’d always been impeccably groomed, but now he looked unhinged.
He followed her gaze out the window toward the smoldering remains of Norgeby House. “Olympus, it seems, has fallen.” His voice was stiff with disbelief.
It wasn’t her problem, she told herself. She had been cast out months ago. Her world had been destroyed, not in the burning of a dusty building off Baker Street, but somewhere in the darkness of Occupied France when she had failed her girls and lost so many of them for good. But Norgeby House was emblematic of the organization that she had given everything to build. And now it was gone. Her eyes burned.
She perched on the edge of the chair he’d indicated. “What happened?”
“A fire,” he said, stating the obvious.
“It might have been an accident,” she offered. Norgeby House, with its endless piles of papers and operators constantly smoking, had been a tinderbox waiting to go up in flames.
“Perhaps,” he said, but she could tell by the tone of his voice that he was skeptical. “There will be an investigation.”
Which did not, Eleanor reflected, mean that there would be answers. “Why did you call me, sir?”
“A bloody mess,” he muttered, but was he talking about the fire or something more? He poured tea from the tray Imogen had left on the edge of his desk. “They’re shutting us down. The whole of SOE. Orders straight from Whitehall. With the war over, they say they don’t need us anymore. We’ve recalled all of the agents.”
“All of the agents you can find,” she corrected. “Have there been any word of the others? My girls, I mean.”
“Seven of the girls have been accounted for,” he said. For a moment, Eleanor’s hopes rose. But then he shared the list with her and she saw the notations: Auschwitz, 1945, Ravensbrück, 1944. “Places where the girls have been confirmed dead.”
Dead. Eleanor’s grief and sense of responsibility for what had happened rose like a wave, threatening to drown her. “And the remaining five?”
“They’ve been given a disposition. Missing. Presumed dead,” he said bluntly. It was an awful verdict, ominous yet uncertain.
“That isn’t enough to tell the families. They were wives, daughters, mothers, for goodness sake.” It was true that some of the families may have put it to rest, lowered empty coffins into the ground or had a memorial service to remember. But for others, the unanswered questions hit hard. Like Rhoda Hobbs’s mother, who had sat sobbing when Eleanor had called on her with questions just days earlier. “Rhoda was a typist,” her mother protested, when Eleanor had suggested that she might have been lost during the war. “The last time I spoke with her, she said she was just running papers down to Plymouth.” Eleanor saw Rhoda in her mind’s eye, boarding the Lysander that had taken her across the Channel, never to return.
Mothers like Rhoda’s deserved to know of their daughters’ valor—and what had become of them. Rage burned white-hot in her as she saw the girls, who had given everything for a promise, betrayed.
“And there’s no word of them?”
“I’m not supposed to discuss such matters, now that your clearances have been revoked.” Though not news to her, the statement felt like a blow. “But I suppose you deserve to know—there are reports from the camps. No records, of course, but eyewitness accounts. They say that the women were executed immediately.” Eleanor turned away, sickened. “Other than that, there has been no indication that any are alive. I think hoping at this point is foolhardy. We must presume them dead.” If he had sent her months earlier as she had asked, she might have found some of them alive. Now it was too late.
Eleanor tried to steady her hands. She took the cup of Earl Grey he offered and felt the warmth, waiting for him to say more. “We still don’t know how they were caught. That is, how the Germans managed the radio game in the first place.”
The Director cleared his throat. “You have notes, I assume, from your search?”
She shifted abruptly, and tea sloshed over the side of the cup, burning her skin. “Sir?” she asked, as though she did not know what he was referring to. She prepared to deny she still possessed any papers after she had been dismissed and told to leave matters alone. But, of course, Eleanor had not stopped looking. She had kept digging through old newspapers and files from the Public Records Office at Kew Gardens, making inquiries through government contacts. She had not just combed all of the records she could get her hands on; she had spoken to every last person in Britain who had any connection to the girls, including the agents who had come back and the families of those who had not. There were complicated stories of arrests, dozens of rabbit holes, but none of them shed any light about what happened to the missing girls, or the truth of how they had been caught in the first place.
Perhaps word of her inquiries had trickled back to the Director. She was a private citizen now, she thought. What right did they have to forbid her?
But there would be no fooling the Director. Eleanor set down her tea and pulled the file that she always carried with her from her messenger bag and studied it. She handed over the folder containing all the information she was not supposed to have—and that she knew he would want to see.
The Director thumbed through her notes and she could tell from his expression that they did not contain anything he didn’t already know. “Like I’ve always said, it’s a bloody shame about these girls.” The Director handed back her file and Eleanor clutched it tightly, the sharp edge cutting into the scarred pads of her fingertips. “I’m prepared to send you.”
She could not believe her own ears. “Sir?”
“If you’re still keen to go, of course. To find out what became of the missing girls—and how they were all caught in the first place.” He knew that she’d been more than keen to go. Those girls had consumed her, and she was desperate to find out about them.
A dozen questions circled in her mind. “Why now?” Eleanor managed finally. After the months of rejection and pain, she needed to understand.
“I’d been thinking about calling you for some time. For one thing, someone’s been asking questions.”
“Who?”
“Thogden Barnett.” Violet’s father. Eleanor had spoken with Barnett not two weeks earlier and had sensed among all of the parents that he was the angriest, the least likely to let it go. So she had fed him ever so subtly her doubts and questions about what had happened to the girls, let the ideas fester in his brain. An outsider, he could take it to his member of parliament and press the matter in a way that she could not. Apparently the gamble had paid off. “Most of the families have, as you know, tried to put the past behind them,” the Director continued. “But Mr. Barnett has been asking questions about what happened to his daughter and how she died. When no one answered to his satisfaction, he brought the matter to his MP. They’re threatening a parliamentary investigation. I need to be able to tell them how the girls died—or at least all of the ways we tried to find out.”